Hatred by Another Name: Unmasking the Band of National False Heroes by Chin Ce

Avid speculations by the liege of Asari Dokubo are rife that the Nigerian president recently returned from United Kingdom on health exile is a clone of a brain dead original. So goes the report in the Daily Post of October 3, 2017. But clone or no, evidence abounds from his antecedents in office of a quietly vicious and unrepentant jingoist using so called non-negotiable Nigerian unity to foist parochial interests upon a bulbous nation, and to the detriment of the south for which he had always had deep-seated contempt mingled with jealousy.

The evidence lies in his short lived military adventurism in 1984.

A sleaze of promotion to the ranks of generals in the Nigerian army was revealed by the BBC in 1984 as skewed in favor of mainly northern officers. No singularly qualified officer from the south east was deemed eligible for promotion, the BBC reported.

The gestalt was following the well laid script to perpetually ‘hold down the south so the north can climb’.

In response to the damming evidence, the junta quickly did a face saving volte face only two weeks later by having the then chief of staff Tunde Idiagbon decorate one or two Igbo officers to the rank of brigadier general, but not without a swipe at BBC that the Nigerian army was united and not to be divided along non existing tribal ethnicities which the BBC was trying to foment.

How ironical such avid denial by core northern oligarchs of their own paranoia and ethnocentrism even in the face of evidence.

I have written severally about the nauseating hypocrisy of half educated men like Buhari, Abacha, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abdusalami, et hoc, and the dangers they frequently posed to the growth and evolution of all Nigerians along the egalitarian path of justice and equity for the constituent parts of their federation.

That danger lies in the collective lazy elite mindset foisted from the Murtala Mohammed counter coup that eliminated a clueless general Ironsi but saw an imbecile Yakubu Gowon climbing the throne of head of state of Nigeria’s new federation based upon the plan of perpetuating northern dominance in the management and jurisdiction of the country’s national and international affairs.

Thenceforth it seemed that every semi-literate that came to rule Nigeria must hail from a conclave which rested its life force on the seizure of political power.

Even the various constitutions were skewed to allow dubious primary school leaving certificate holders to become presidents because a primary school certificate seemed all that northern Nigeria could offer by way of modern education.

It should always be remembered that Boko Haram meaning ‘western education is forbidden’ is a philosophy of an atavistic Islamic North, not just that of the murderous jihadists of the same name. Till date, ‘Turenci’ meaning English is still anathema in core northern states and it is the dream of these parochial and self serving irredentists that Hausa will one day become Lingua Franca for the whole of Nigeria even if Islam does not make it to be the major religion.

One only needs to read the verbal sleight of hand of the present Buhari misadventure in politics to interpret this essentially northern hypocrisy: One of his broadcasts to his nation while almost dying in the United Kingdom was in Hausa. Gowon did the same during the 1966 pogrom against the Igbo. Using Hausa had always meant to reaffirm the mindset of northern indivisibility against the threat of opposing forces from a south they had always dreaded might one day shake itself loose from the bondage and exploitation of an arrangee order. In the incipient Buhari era, the opposing force was coming from the rising profile of his vice and acting president Osinbajo – from the south!

Such is the hypocrisy in the present dispensation of the cabal led by Buhari who had ridden into our hearts only with the promise to fight corruption, impunity and squander-manic mindlessness of the Jonathan years. But his vicious ethnic survivalism at the expense of the progressive but disunited south was on hand to be exploited to the fullest as soon as he was made president.

Many Buhari haters in the south east were informed by his antecedents as a fanatical core-north cabalist stooge. The recent events unfolding across the spectrum of the former British colony, climaxing in the branding of a whole people as terrorists, seem to have proven them right. Only the idealists like us had believed that the dawn of a truly egalitarian society for Nigeria was long overdue and could be realised under a regime that had promised accountability and change.

For now that idealism is Morning Yet On Creation Day, as the great rebel and father of African Literature, Chinua Achebe, wrote years ago.

To my mind, and even to a casual observer, it would not take a clone of Buhari to implement the grandiose exploits of a hateful conclave of ombudsmen intent upon dominion and parasitism in Nigeria’s affairs. It only needs the revitalizing of the original Muhammadu Buhari, added to their robotic parroting of unity and indivisibility, to implement the agenda that one section must continue to dictate for Nigeria the pace and momentum of change which, in their twisted logic, can only mean the globalization of elite tyranny and religious backwardness upon the fortunes that stupid Mr. Lugard and the bloody British had bequeathed them in West Africa.

Fortunately that backward progress as envisioned by a hateful breed of irredentists is almost come to an end.

Roused by the irrepressible conscience of the South East, Nigeria is poised for the great spring of generations unborn.

The ethnic chauvinists masquerading for One Nigeria and their band of anti-Turenci bigots of the conclave are finally at the end of their tethers in the manipulation of history and employment of brute military force for unmerited advantages.

The nation they yearn for their grand exploits is clamoring for Restructuring.

And, oblivious to even his finer instincts, the Hypocrite had gone to the United Nations to further the cause of Restructuring by calling for a Restructured UN.

There again this leading Hypocrite of National Unity had also canvassed for the right of self determination of the Palestinian people.

Both cases of dramatic irony lie in such synchronous parallel with the southern debacle that faces the clueless general.

Buhari’s end of the road as a bigot and hater is nowhere more graphologically poignant than in the IPOB agitation which he vainly hopes to decimate by military fiat. The world has called on him to negotiate with the legitimate aspirations of those whom he had hated since the quirk of his birth. And negotiate he must.

The era of the band of national false heroes that have ruled this country from Balewa through Buhari is finally at its overdrive.

That era will soon be buried as renewed agitations engulf the Buhari sultanate from every nook and cranny of each and every Nigerian sub nationality.